WARREN ELLIS is a graphic novelist and author of the NYT best-selling novel GUN MACHINE. His graphic novel GLOBAL FREQUENCY is being developed for television by Jerry Bruckheimer and FOX. He is the writer of the graphic novel RED, adapted into the film starring Bruce Willis and Helen Mirren. His next book is NORMAL from FSG.

Behind the putrid smells emanating from the otherwise ordinary apartment was the body of 74-year-old Kisaburo Suzuki. He’d spent the last few years of his existence bedridden and battling illness.

And though Suzuki’s corpse was found in January, almost a year after his death, he was not one of the tragic cases where a neglected old person has died alone and their body allowed to rot in oblivion. Far from it, as it turns out. The body of Kisaburo Suzuki went undiscovered for so long because there was somebody who could not bear with the thought of leaving it alone.

Kisaburo had been cared for by his younger sister, 68-year-old Michiko, who lived in a home about 50 meters away from his. Michiko Suzuki said that her brother had died on Feb. 10 last year. She said that he was her last remaining sibling and she couldn’t bear the thought of being left alone, so didn’t tell anybody that he had died…”